All the news that’s fit to Twit

Posted by Martin Stabe on 21 March 2007 at 13:54
Tags: BBC, British Press Awards, CNET, CNET News.com, CNN, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mashups, New York Times, Press Association, Wired, twitter

Just in time for its first anniversary last week, the Twitter has gained a huge surge in attention to go with accelerating growth in its user base.

The service, which combines social networking and blogging, allow users to send 140-character updates detailing what they are doing at the moment. Users can chose to have their friends’ messages delivered directly to an instant massager account or mobile phone via text message.

Helped by a flurry of adoption among the digerati at TED and SXSW conferences, Twitter has become the current darling among the usual early-adopter crowd — and has frustrated some by slowing down tremendously as a consequence.

Twitter invites users to reply to the question “What are you doing right now?” It then sends the responses — by RSS, IM or, crucially, mobile phone — to all of those friends who have signed up to follow that user’s messages.

Inevitably, this invitation has meant that the service is being used primarily for communicating the most banal aspects of everyday life — and this has led to a Marmite-like devision of opinion among the online commentariat.

Some A-list bloggers are contemplating shifting most of their everyday writing to the service. Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis, for example, announced that “90% of my blogging is now on Twitter”, prompting howls of disapproving comments from some of his regular readers.

While the enthusiasts can’t get enough Twittering, its detractors are equally unflinching.

“Of all the masturbatory ego-fluffers on the Web, nothing chafes me worse than Twitter,” complained Steve Bryant of eWeek. “Not content with blogging — itself a microchunked, short-form version of diary keeping — we’ve taken to journaling the minute-by-minute factlets and factoids of our bite-sized lives.”

Like the blogging naysayers, the Twitter-haters are absolutely right when they complain that 99 per cent of the communication produced with the service is utter rubbish. Even the closest of friends are probably not interested in receiving a text message every time one of their mates farts.

But by focusing on the banality of most Twitter messages, the service’s critics are guilty of the same logical error as those who dismiss blogging because of the stupidity they observe in many bloggers: they confuse medium and message, technology and content.

Twitter may be encouraging its early adopters to use the service in a relatively banal form of content, but technology adoption never works out quite as the developers of new services imagined or even intended.

The technical idea underlying Twitter is interesting: It is a gateway service that lets users easily post and receive between three normally incompatible short-messaging services: web site comments, instant messaging and SMS text messages.

And like many of the Web 2.0 sites, Twitter has been clever about encouraging such unintended uses, by providing an API that makes it easy for skilled users to find innovative uses for the service.

Anil Dash of Six Apart, put it well when he wrote on his blog: “The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect. “

And that is certainly happening. US presidential hopeful John Edwards is using Twitter to keep supporters abreast of his campaign.

One user has created service that automatically provides service updates for the London Underground.

And of course, many people have seen the potential of the service for distributing news alerts. The Press Association announced last week that it would be using Twitter to distribute updates of Gordon Brown’s budget announcement today.

PA’s experiment is not the first attempt to use Twitter as a vehicle for distributing news, but what’s unusual about it is that it is being produced in-house rather than by their enthusiastic readers.

A few months ago, Twitter user Mario Menti created a mashup that ports the latest headlines from CNN and the BBC into Twitter, allowing users to receive headlines and links to breaking news headlines on their mobile phones by joining the publication’s network of Twitter friends.

A similar service have appeared for Google News headlines. Blogger Dave Winer created a Twitter headline service for Wired after a journalist at the magazine suggested it on one of the magazine’s blogs. The New York Times has both an official Twitter account and another one produced by Dave Winer. There is what looks like an official Twitter feed for technology site CNET News.com.

While I was writing this post, my phone chirped with a Twitter message from Guardian blogs editor Kevin Anderson revealing that something Twitter-related is afoot at Graun towers as well.

Of course, we’re not beyond jumping on the Twitter bandwagon ‘round here. Next Monday evening, you’ll be able to get the British Press Awards winners on your mobile phone as they are announced. Just follow the user ‘pressgazette‘ on Twitter.

Update: Even political blogger Guido Fawkes seems to be Twittering.

Update 22/3: The Guardian’s Twitter feeds, created by Ben Hammersley, are ‘guardiannews‘ and ‘commentisfree‘. Simon Dickson notes that Nick Robinson’s frantic budget micro-blogging for the BBC might have been a good use for Twitter (a bit like PA’s experiment, perhaps).

Update 23/3: Jack Lail ponders the journalistic applications of Twitter.

Tags: BBC, British Press Awards, CNET, CNET News.com, CNN, Guardian Unlimited, Journalism, Mashups, New York Times, Press Association, Wired, twitter